Bayou Christmas Memory
Chris Segura
Published by Win or Lose, Ink
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Chris Segura
On his belly, legs positioned to absorb the recoil as he had been taught by his soldier brother, he lined the tip of the front sight blade level with the wings of the back sight and exactly on the bottom line of the bird’s brilliantly colored breast.
Both eyes open to detect any movement in the periphery of his sight picture, he could clearly see the long, white bristles of the tufted tail as he took a deep, pine-scented breath, slowly let half of it escape and squeezed the trigger.
The gun coughed impotently and of course there was no recoil. It was only a bee-bee gun and an unloaded one at that. The bird was a glass Christmas tree ornament, precious to his mother. Still, ever since he had been given the bee-bee gun he could not help imagining the glorious shattering of the glass against a well-placed orb of swirling, copper-coated lead.
Originally, there had been six of them but he remembered only two and one had broken the Christmas before, absolutely through no fault of his own.
He was bored. More than that, the boredom was edged with excruciating contemplation. It was the twilight of Christmas Eve. That night the family would open the piles of brightly wrapped presents under the tree. Right then, though, there was only the boy, his grandmother and his youngest older brother in the house. Everyone else had mysteriously disappeared.
His brother was alone somewhere and undoubtedly reading science fiction. He was a teenager, moody and in rebellion against all traditions. That would change 180 degrees but for the moment he simply was not fun to be around.
His grandmother was in the kitchen, reading her novena while the milk heated for the eggnog. She never worked from any recipe, measured any ingredients or watched any pot and the milk never boiled even though she never watched it or used a timer. Maybe she was measuring the time by paragraphs in the little holy book.
They would never know how she did it and, even though her descendants have now tried for decades, they have never been able to quite duplicate her dishes. She used more than a dozen eggs from the henhouse out back, though, and equal portions of cream and milk in the making. The best part was watching her whip the egg whites and fold them into the milk.
His sister said the finished product was more like hot custard than regular Tom-and-Jerry. The boy had grown into a man before he heard that expression, “Tom-and-Jerry,” to describe a drink and when he did hear it he thought the woman who used it was referring to one of his favorite cartoons. To him even to this day, eggnog is hot.
No one touched the eggnog until it was ready to drink and the boy always got the first cup. That was because the last ingredient added was poured in by his grandfather: Old Crow Whisky.
“She’s got the egg but I got the nog, pal,” the old man would say, and by that time the boy was already drinking it from a cup although he could have eaten it with a spoon it was so thick. As a man he would learn that nog was once a word for rum. He remembered her eggnog more for the unmatched aroma of cooked egg and cream and nutmeg brown and sprinkled on the islands of floating froth like meringue.
Christmas morning there would only be those presents that Santa brought and only for him. Santa was no longer interested in the boy’s older siblings. Perhaps this would be the year that his mother would finally capture him. She said she would hold him by his long, white beard while the boy bound him with the narrow rope he always carried coiled in those days, pretending to be a frontiersman of the old Wild West. It was left over from the lashings of their bundles to the truck that took him away from his father.
In the meantime, it would help a lot if they let him open that huge can of hard candy. The can was still sealed with tape. There was no chance of deception.
It was not as though there was nothing in the house to eat but he was just about sick to death of fruitcake. His grandmother baked at least 100 fruitcakes, both dark and light every Christmas, and dispersed them about town all in one afternoon so no one would feel slighted.
She would have made a big difference in France when the queen said, “Let them eat cake.” There would have been no revolution.
Boredom was worse than a bellyache to the boy. It had been better with the ice storm outside. Now it was just regular south Louisiana winter weather. At their grandfather’s birthday just three days before, they had explained to him about the winter solstice, that it was the shortest day in the year and that the days would be getting longer from now until summer vacation from school.
The old man said he had been born on that date so he wouldn’t have to work so hard his first day.
In the decades following the demise of the boy’s personal belief in Santa Claus – which came slowly, not abruptly as in most cases and would begin on very next morning – he would learn that the return of light and consequently life itself was what they were really celebrating, a custom that antedated even Christ. So far, he had seen no true daylight. His world was confined to an overheated house surrounded by wet, barren foliage and mud beyond frost-dripping windowpanes, the outside visible for only a few yards through sheets of rain.
The only benefit was the tranquilizing, anaesthetizing drumming of thick drops on a tin roof that made wakefulness impossible when weariness set in. Then suddenly, more suddenly than Santa Claus, boredom vanished with a door banging open.
His mother and oldest brother, his sister and grandfather burst in with paper shopping bags stapled shut at the top and stowed in the corner closet before they even took off their coats. Their noses were red and their eyes were bright and they seemed immeasurably joyful. His brother’s first action was to open the can of candy and they found it hardened into a colorful small boulder by the dampness.
“That’s rock candy,” his grandfather quipped as his brother chipped pieces for him with an ice pick from the kitchen as their grandmother came in with the big punchbowl of eggnog. She filled two cups for him first as the old man stood poised with the whisky. The old woman shook her head disapprovingly and simultaneously smiling at the amount that he poured and the boy already had a moustache of meringue before the others were even served.
The balance of the evening went by in a blur of torn bright-colored paper and shiny new objects, uproarious laughter for the many humorous gifts, lots of awwws and many thank-yous and you-shouldn’t-haves with hugs. The Christmas Eve gifts weren’t even the best ones. This much he’d say for Santa, the ‘old reprobate’ as his mother sometimes called him sure knew how to bring presents for children: no socks. His brothers and sister sure didn’t mind clothes for Christmas, though, and the one that was moody most of the time those days was overjoyed with a sweater.
The boy’s best gift that night was a set of six arrows (he was always losing arrows in the adjacent woodland) and his brother accidentally stepped on one, breaking it off just forward of the fletching. Obviously to ward off any bad feelings, the old man instantly resorted to wit.
Well, that’s just like the picture show,” he said, “’Broken Arrow.’” They had just seen the movie about the “good” Apache chief, Cochise, starring James Stewart, at the drive-in theater. Except for his favorite movie, “Shane” which was still three years from premiering, you couldn’t get the old man inside a movie-house with a crowbar.
Then he took the splintered shaft in his hands, looked at it scientifically and announced that they would use it to grow not only another arrow but another tree. He insisted that everything was alive, even stones and the floor beneath their feet, swirling with things called atoms, but wood could regenerate. In the morning, he said, they would plant it down the slope by the coulee.
Even by then, the boy knew that his grandfather was a teller of tall tales. The disconcerting thing was that sometimes the strangest things he said turned out to be true. You never knew quite what to believe. So the boy believed everything he said.
His name as a giver was on none of the gifts. When asked for an explanation he said his family had been so poor that as a child that he had never gotten any presents himself so he never gave them as a man. That didn’t matter to the boy in childhood and as a man he realized that everything they had – the food and the drink, the warmth and the wit, even their bodies and their minds and what gentleness they retained, for the most part – came from him.
Another gift they all got was modeling clay, a family tradition. That was truly a gift that kept giving because it was directly creative. They all sat making silly statues and objects, showing them around then squeezing them into a ball and starting over. The old couple were surprisingly creative, but they had been at it longer.
His grandfather made the only thing that survived the evening. Of red clay he formed an Indian warlord complete with a long headdress of tinsel from the tree. He dubbed him “Chief Don’t-Give-a-Damn” and put him astride a windup bear that walked around growling. The warrior’s face can only be described as menacing. The old man was partial to Native Americans. He had been born in the Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1882 and had come to Louisiana in a covered wagon with his family as a child.
The boy found it easiest to make snakes – which his sister detested even in inanimate form – rolling them into shape between the palms of his hands. She screwed her nose up like she would at a stink and looked away every time he showed her one.
His grandfather, to the rest of the world shy and wry-witted, was robust and jovial with his family that night. He wore his Christmas-special red vest and entertained them by dancing the soft-shoe to his own accompaniment on the harmonica. The boy went to sleep on the floor with him dancing around him and hovering above.
He awoke late. The aromas of baking waterfowl awoke him. The centerpiece bird was a huge Canada goose that his brother had killed the morning the ice storm broke. His grandmother was bent over basting it when he walked into the kitchen.
Every burner on the stove had a pot atop it. She had sewed cornbread stuffing into the cavity of the goose. The gravy-brown string, itself was appetizing. And there were pots of wild ducks roasting on the stove, one large one for the mallards and one pintail and a smaller one with two teal inside. The teal were for his grandfather, the old man’s favorite.
In the big room, he discovered that Santa Claus had escaped his mother’s clutches again but left wrapped and unwrapped gifts behind for him. Right in the middle was something he thought at first sight was a pumpkin but running up saw that it was a brand-new basketball. Before anyone could tell him not to, he grabbed it and bounced it on the floor and the vibrations shook the Christmas tree so that three ornaments fell, one of them the bird with the tufted tail that crashed into about one hundred pieces on the floor.
He grabbed the ball quickly, in mid-air, but of course it was too late. His mother rushed to the tree and looked down at the broken glass with her hands on her hips, a certain sign of displeasure. His grandfather, as usual, rushed to the rescue.
“It was the ball’s fault,” he said. His mother didn’t look at them. She went for the broom and dustpan.
“And your big brother got up before day to fill it with air, too,” the old man said.
“But … Santa brought it,” the boy said.
There was just one tiny fleeting moment when the boy saw in his grandfather’s face a flicker of guilt.
“Well … sure, pal,” the old man said. “Santa ain’t got room in his sled for inflated basketballs. He’s got to pack tight.”
He didn’t realize it then – maybe because he wasn’t ready for the truth about Santa yet – but he had just caught his grandfather lying for the first time. The old man knew it, though. He blushed.
“Come on, pal, get on your boots,” he said. “Let’s go plant the arrow.”
They stuck the arrow tip-down in the silt by the coulee. Like a fadeout in a movie, that Christmas ends in his memory then. The rest probably took its course they way Christmases usually do, the newness of toys rapidly fading, the doldrums of winter really setting in, the regular routines of life returning. He was given to remember it again in the spring.
Wearing only a breechclout, he was scouting the perimeters the house with his Winchester (actually his bee-bee gun), searching to warn Cochise of any enemy cavalry, when he saw a strange and beautiful, multi-colored bird perch on a tiny sapling far down the slope. He could swear that it had a long, white, tufted tail.
He ran to get his mother to show her but by the time they got back there it was gone, of course, so she went back into the house. He edged down the slope to investigate, hoping to find at least some bright, shiny feather left behind. The only thing he discovered, though, was that the tiny sapling had a splintered top.
The bird might only have been in his imagination. The sapling could have been damaged in any number of ways. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that in that instant he remembered Christmas as the celebration of light, consequently life itself.